Hashish - The Man of Letters

B E F O R E going further I should like,
a propos of this sensation of coolth of which I spoke above, to
tell another story which will serve to show to what point the effects,
even the purely physical effects, may vary according to the individual.
This time it is a man of letters who speaks, and in some parts of his
story one will (I think) be able to find the indications of the
literary temperament. "I had taken," he told me, "a moderated
dose of extrait gras, and all was going as well as possible.
The crisis of gaiety had not lasted long, and I found myself in a
state of languor and wonderment which was almost happiness. I
looked forward, then, to a quiet and unworried evening: unfortunately
chance urged me to go with a friend to the theatre. I took the
heroic course, resolved to overcome my immense desire to to be idle
and motionless. All the carriages in my district were engaged; I was
obliged to walk a long distance amid the discordant noises of the
traffic, the stupid conversation of the passers-by, a whole ocean
of triviality. My finger-tips were already slightly cool; soon this
turned into a most acute cold, as if I had plunged
both hands into a bucket of ice-water. But this was not suffering; this
needle-sharp sensation stabbed me rather like a pleasure. Yet it seemed
to me that this cold enveloped me more and more as the interminable journey
went on. I asked two or three times of the person with whom I
was if it was actually very cold. He replied to me that, on the contrary,
the temperature was more than warm. Installed at last in the room, shut
up in the box which had been given me, with three or four hours of
repose in front of me, I thought myself arrived at the Promised Land.
The feelings on which I had trampled during the journey with all the
little energy at my disposal now burst in, and I give myself up freely to my
silent frenzy. The cold ever increased, and yet I saw people lightly
clad, and even wiping their foreheads with an air of weariness. This
delightful idea took hold of me, that I was a privileged man, to whom
alone had been accorded the right to feel cold in summer in the
auditorium of a theatre. This cold went on increasing until it became
alarming; yet I was before all dominated by my curiosity to know to
what degree it could possibly sink. At last it came to such a point,
it was so complete, so general, that all my ideas froze, so to speak;
I was a piece of thinking ice. I imagined myself as a statue carved
in a block of ice, and this mad hallucination made me so proud,
excited in me such a feeling of moral well-being, that I despair of
defining it to you. What added to my abominable enjoyment was the
certainty that all the other people present were ignorant of my nature
and of the superiority that I had over them, and then with the pleasure of
thinking that my companion never suspected for a moment with what
strange feelings I was filled, I clasped the reward of my
dissimulation, and my extraordinary pleasure was a veritable secret.

B E S I D E S, I had scarcely entered the box
when my eyes had been struck with an impression of darkness which seemed
to me to have some relationship with the idea of cold; it is, however,
possible that these two ideas had lent each other strength. You know that
hashish always invokes magnificences of light, splendours of colour,
cascades of liquid gold; all light is sympathetic to it, both that which
streams in sheets and that which hangs like spangles to points and
roughnesses; the candelabra of salons, the wax candles that people burn
in May, the rosy avalanches of sunset. It seems that the miserable
chandelier spread a light far too insignificant to quench this
insatiable thirst of brilliance. I thought, as I told you, that I was
entering a world of shadows, which, moreover, grew gradually thicker,
while I dreamt of the Polar night and the eternal winter. As to the
stage, it was a stage consecrated to the comic Muse; that alone was
luminous; infinitely small and far off, very far,
like a landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. I will not
tell you that I listened to the actors; you know that that is impossible.
From time to time my thoughts snapped up on the wing a fragment of a
phrase, and like a clever dancing-girl used it as a spring-board to leap
into far-distant reveries. You might suppose that a play heard in this
manner would lack logic and coherence. Undeceive yourself! I
discovered an exceeding subtle sense in the drama created by my
distraction. Nothing jarred on me, and I resembled a little that poet
who, seeing Esther played for the first time, found it quite natural that
Haman should make a declaration of love to the queen. It was, as you
guess, the moment where he throws himself at the feet of Esther to beg
pardon of his crime. If all plays were listened to on these lines
they all, even those of Racine, would gain enormously. The actors
seemed to me exceedingly small, and bounded by a precise and clear-cut
line, like the figures in Meissonier's pictures. I saw distinctly not
only the most minute details of their costumes, their patterns, seams,
buttons, and so on, but also the line of separation between the
false forehead and the real; the white, the blue, and the red, and all
the tricks of make-up; and these Lilliputians were clothed about
with a cold and magical clearness, like that which a very clean
glass adds to an oil-painting. When at last I was able to emerge from
this cavern of frozen shadows, and when, the interior
phantasmagoria being dissipated, I came to myself, I
experienced a greater degree of weariness than prolonged and difficult
work has ever caused me."

I T I S, in fact, at this period of
the intoxication that is manifested a new delicacy, a superior
sharpness in each of the senses: smell, sight, hearing, touch
join equally in this onward march; the eyes behold the Infinite; the
ear perceives almost inaudible sounds in the midst of the
most tremendous tumult. It is then that the hallucinations begin;
external objects take on wholly and successively most strange
appearances; they are deformed and transformed. Then -- the ambiguities,
the misunderstandings, and the transpositions of ideas! Sounds cloak
themselves with colour; colours blossom into music. That, you will say,
is nothing but natural. Every poetic brain in its healthy, normal
state, readily conceives these analogies. But I have already warned
the reader that there is nothing of the positively supernatural in
hashish intoxication; only those analogies possess an unaccustomed
liveliness; they penetrate and they envelop; they overwhelm the
mind with their masterfulness. Musical notes become numbers; and if
your mind is gifted with some mathematical aptitude, the harmony
to which you listen, while keeping its voluptuous and sensual
character, transforms itself into a vast rhythmical operation, where
numbers beget numbers, and whose phases and generation follow with an
inexplicable ease and an agility which equals that of the person playing.

I T H A P P E N S sometimes that the
sense of personality disappears, and that the objectivity which is the
birthright of Pantheist poets develops itself in you so abnormally that
the contemplation of exterior objects makes you forget your own existence
and confound yourself with them. Your eye fixes itself upon a tree, bent by
the wind into an harmonious curve; in some seconds that which in the brain
of a poet would only be a very natural comparison becomes in yours a
reality. At first you lend to the tree your passions, your desire, or
your melancholy; its creakings and oscillations become yours, and soon
you are the tree. In the same way with the bird which hovers in the abyss
of azure: at first it represents symbolically your own immortal longing
to float above things human; but soon you are the bird itself. Suppose,
again, you are seated smoking; your attention will rest a little too
long upon the bluish clouds which breathe forth from your pipe; the
idea of a slow, continuous, eternal evaporation will possess itself of
your spirit, and you will soon apply this idea to your own thoughts, to
your own apparatus of thought. By a singular ambiguity, by a species
of transposition or intellectualbarter, you feel yourself
evaporating, and you will attribute to your pipe, in which you feel
yourself crouched and pressed down like the tobacco, the strange
faculty of smoking you!

L U C K I L Y,
this interminable imagination has only lasted a minute. For a
lucid interval, seized with a great effort, has allowed you to look
at the clock. But another current of ideas bears you away; it will
roll you away for yet another minute in its living whirlwind, and this
other minute will be an eternity. For the proportion of time and being
are completely disordered by the multitude and intensity of your feelings
and ideas. One may say that one lives many times the space of a man's
life during a single hour. Are you not, then, like a fantastic novel,
but alive instead of being written? There is no longer any equation
between the physical organs and their enjoyments; and it is above all
on this account that arises the blame which one must give to this
dangerousexercise in which liberty is forfeited.